Career
He is the author of the poetry collections Reticent Bodies and Floating Life. Poems from Surani"s debut collection, Reticent Bodies, began appearing in 2001, when Canadian poet Todd Swift published the anthology 100 Poets Against the War. Surani"s "Realpolitik," initially published under the pseudonym "d.m.," was selected as part of this critique of the Iraq War.
From 2002 to 2008, his poetry was published in Canada and abroad.
Reticent Bodies was published in fall, 2009. Poet and critic Jacob McArthur Mooney stated that the book is a return to the Canadian romantic mode of Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton.
In the Journal of Canadian, another review praised the book for its expressiveness. In 2008, Surani received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship to visit his ancestral homelands, India and East Africa.
That award"s jury citation states that the poem "dramatizes the tension between the world of the collective myth and poetic imagination on the one hand and individual experience and empirical decision on the other." Between 2008 and 2011, Surani traveled extensively in Asia, Europe and Africa.
Surani"s second poetry collection, Floating Life, was published in spring, 2012. The book"s themes have been characterized as travel, "connections made and left behind, and, above all, the fleeting nature of experience." In interview, Surani said that Floating Life"s prevailing theme is a divestment of personal power. In 2013, Surani"s poem "lieutenant All Keeps" was included in Best Canadian 2013.
In 2014, Surani exhibited a work in progress, عملية Operación Opération Operation 行动 Oперация.
This inventory poem collects together the names of military operations by United Nations-member countries from the founding of the United Nations to the present. Surani has defined poetry as "the residue of living.".